Principal cast: Al Jolson, Joseph Cawthorn, Jose Collins, Nat M. Wills, Elizabeth Brice, George MacFarlane, Christie MacDonald, Frank Pollack, Henrietta Wakefield, George Grossmith, Irving Berlin, Chauncey Olcott, Margaret Romaine, Raymond Hitchcock, Bert Williams, Eleanor Painter, Charles King, Leslie Henson, Sousa's Band, Roy Atwell, May Naudain, Mizzi Hajos, Marguerite Farrell, Ben Linn, Van & Schenk, Henry Lewis, Billy B. Van.Contains early and rare stage performances, originally recorded on discs and cylinders and collected from various public and private libraries.The third volume of British archive label Pearl Records' series of four three-CD sets compiling original cast recordings of Broadway shows from 1890-1920 covers only a four-year period, from the start of 1913 to the start of 1917. This was a period when imported and homegrown operettas competed with musical comedy revues. Composers Victor Herbert, Jerome Kern, and Irving Berlin were in the ascendant, along with performers Al Jolson, Chauncey Olcott, and Bert Williams, and all are heard from here (Berlin even performs one of his own songs). Jolson, the first Broadway star also to be a major recording star, is especially dominant, being featured on 11 of the 68 tracks. But like its predecessors, this volume suffers from the lack of original cast recordings of some of the most popular songs to emerge from Broadway shows during the period. Of the ten songs introduced in Broadway musicals of the period that topped the charts (according to Joel Whitburn's book Pop Memories), only four are included here. It's not that the recordings exist and haven't been included; it's that with the exception of Jolson and several others, Broadway stars simply didn't make records, leaving popular recording stars to score hits with the songs they had introduced. In this sense, the album provides an accurate, exhaustive survey of the original cast recordings of Broadway shows of 1913-1917, it's just that the extant recordings themselves are inadequate to fully document the era. (Note that the sound quality, while good for unimproved tracks mastered from records from the era, does not remotely compare to 1990s standards.) ~ William Ruhlmann